Game over for those who post links with misleading titles on Facebook: a new algorithm is rolling out.
Increasingly often, while scrolling through their News Feed on Facebook, people come across content that is sometimes misleading.
For the most part, these are links with unclear, ambiguous, and very often deceptive titles that – as presented – entice people to click on them to learn more.
In most cases, the reality does not match what the title promised, and so users find themselves on external sites not affiliated with Facebook, pages that do not contain any video – as suggested by the clicked link – or contain content incompatible with their expectations.
The Facebook staff has decided to give less and less space to this type of link by modifying the algorithm that determines the visibility of one piece of content over another on the social network’s subscribed users’ timelines.
Will this be the end of so-called “click-bait” links? It seems so, as has been communicated by the staff working on this update.
The aim is to hunt down deceptive links, such as those that read, “You’ll never believe which stars fought on the Red Carpet, click here…”, exactly as quoted on the official Facebook blog.
To curb this type of deceptive link dissemination, the algorithm will analyze two aspects:
the time spent (therefore, theoretically viewing and/or reading) by users on the posts in question;
the amount and type of interaction with the proposed content.
Therefore, the longer the time spent on the redirected page, the greater the correspondence between what is promised by the link title and its content.
Nothing particularly revolutionary: Google also applies similar parameters when updating SERPs, but it is well known that the system is far from perfect, as it is possible to “land” on a site and leave it after a few seconds, not due to a lack of information but precisely because the desired information was found quickly and easily.
Moreover, Facebook has apparently decided to act this way because user reports of spam content have been and continue to be a significant signal to consider.
Therefore, “spring cleaning” is announced for Facebook: page administrators and external site managers are warned.

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